I was thinking about this crazy feather extension thing this morning and Henry Hoffman kept popping into my head.
My friend Brita at the Avid Angler Fly Shop in Lake Forest Park was telling me over the weekend that what most of the women want these days to put in their hair for feather extensions are various colors of grizzly hackle.
Grizzly are the feathers with alternating white and black bars that are now dyed into all sorts of colors.
Henry Hoffman helped save grizzly feathers, breeding chickens to develop their feathers into the long, skinny variety that fly tiers – and now young woman – love so much.
A breeder and commercial fly tier, Hoffman sold his feather business to Tom Whiting in 1989 so he could fly fish more.
But I still think of Hoffman as “the man” when it comes to grizzIy hackle, so I called him this morning to see if he’d kept up with the feather extension craze and what he thought about it.
“That’s all anyone can talk about…how they can’t get the feathers to tie flies,” he said. “I googled it recently and there were more than 100 sites where they’re selling the feathers (for extensions). It’s really gone nuts.”
Hoffman said he read a story about the craze in Sunday’s Portland Oregonian (see previous blog post) and that he’d just heard something on the local radio station.”
I asked him how he got into all this and he told me how he started in 1955 when he was out of high school. He wanted to tie flies for fishing, so he started breeding chickens to develop feathers for that purpose. He said that in 1965 he started focusing on grizzly hackle.
“There was a shortage of grizzly hackle at that time because there was only one American breeder and they didn’t have any overseas,” Hoffman said.
He said he worked on developing grizzly hackle for nine years, then started working on other colors of hackle. He started developing saddle hackle in 1984.
Ultimately, he developed chickens that didn’t molt their feathers every year. Before that, it was very hard to get a feather for fly tying that was longer that 12 inches.
The feathers of his nonmolting birds just kept growing, he said, adding that the only problem then was that they would step on the feathers if they got too long, breaking them or pulling them out.
In 1989, he shipped 23,000 eggs to Whiting and let him continue to develop high quality feathers.
Hoffman continued to sell his remaining skins of feathers and has pretty much exhausted that.
At the time, I wasn’t so crazy about not being able to get Hoffman feathers, so I probably bought 20 or more skins from him at sportsman shows and the like, easily more than a lifetime supply.
He told me this morning that while his skins are gone, he used to save the individual feathers that the birds stepped on or got pulled out.
“I’m still selling those feathers,” he said, noting that he goes to fly fishing shows pretty regularly. (I saw Hoffman at the Fly Fishing Fair put on in April in Ellensburg by the state Federal of Fly Fishers)..
Hoffman said he’s also selling some of those to the hair salons, but mostly the ones with irregularities, such as one side of the feather is longer than the other. He said women don’t care about things like that, but fly tiers do.
“My loyalty goes to the fly fisherman,” he said.
As mentioned above, Hoffman said his necks and saddles are gone, but he has some in the equivalent of a 100 (fly) pack sold by Whiting (who by the way said he’s been unable to produce chickens quickly enough to meet demand.)
Whiting was quoted in the recent Associated Press article as saying he was saving some feathers for fly shops to ensure their supply, but things are getting scarce.
It’s good to know that Hoffman is still thinking about us and that he was wise enough in the 80s to start picking up the feathers that had fallen on the ground.
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